Using a user journey map to visualize users' pain points.
User Research • 2019
Process
Reviews analysis
It's pretty hard to understand how users feel about us by only looking at the comments on the platforms. All users had different experiences that led to different pain points and frustrations. To tackle issues precisely, I used Airtable to record all reviews from App Store and Google Play and categorize them into different sections:
App Related
- 🧎🏻 Order Placing Flow
- ⏱ Order Matching
- 🏃🏻 On-going Orders
- ⚙️ Settings
- 🖋 Registration
- 💰 Payment
Others
- 🚘 Interaction with Drivers
- 🐞 Bugs
- 👩🏻💻 Customer Service
- 👀 Others
- 📣 Marketing
Setting a scope
To prioritize the focus points of the study, I only recorded the major part of the app, which is the order placing flow on the user journey map. Comments in other categories were presented with actual quotes afterward.
User journey map
I separated the journey map into 6 stages - the 6 pages users need to go through in the happy flow. All quotes on the map are real comments from users. They had different problems during the whole delivery experience.
Since I only focused on the bad reviews, the emotion curve here only reflects how users would feel during the whole journey in general.
Unlike the usual user journey map, I added HMWs(How might we) and some actionable items instead of actual changes on the app since there are still many things we can investigate more before jumping into solutions.
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Other discoveries
The above figures do not reflect the actual situation
To show the seriousness of different problems in other categories, I presented charts to visualize the proportion of them.
After comparing the number of issues we found, we discovered that most of the comments were related to offline activities and communications with drivers and customer service. Even those reviews might not directly provide us with information on improving our in-app experience, it was still a great opportunity for us to put ourselves in users’ shoes.
What people were saying
“Very terrible experience...I waited for half an hour after the order was matched, and the driver didn't show up. I call the driver. He told me he was not free at that time and asked me to cancel it myself! ...”— A customer from Taiwan
“The courier was too far. I waited 30 mins until he arrived. Once he arrived, he took pictures of the goods, then made a phone call with Lalamove call center. Afterward, he got on his bike and drove away without saying anything. He should've confirmed whether he could take the order in the first place. It's so unprofessional.”— A customer from Vietnam
“Even when I once reported a driver I got no response from Lalamove. All that happened is the driver won't be booked for my next transactions, but no reprimands or anything like that. Other customers would still experience his bad service.”— A customer from Philippines
Reflections & Learnings
A few things I learned from the reviews are:
- App reviews are not just about the app. Users do not focus on the in-app experience only. Instead, the journey starts from placing an order online to receiving the delivery offline. As a product designer, although it might be hard to solve problems that occur offline, it also led me to wonder how we can communicate better between different departments to address customer pain points efficiently.
- Regular user research helps us better understand users in different aspects. In our product cycle, user research is usually initiated with features. Given this product development process, we might miss the opportunities our users have mentioned. This app review is just the beginning. I believe we can do it more often to discover and solve problems to enhance the entire experience across the app regularly.